The Real-Life Google Noses: Smelltech Is Only Kind of a Joke

Google Nose may be the cleverest gag, if only by a nostril hair, amongst the tech company's annual onslaught of brain-numbing April Fool's pranks. And if it succeeds, it does so as all good hoaxes do—by getting us to swallow preposterous fiction as fact because we're already well-primed to do so. In this case, a search engine for smell is only marginally more absurd than the real-life innovations being rolled out in cutting edge olfactory technology. "Smelltech" is real, even if it was probably best if most of it remained a prank.

Most recently, Japanese researchers think they have unlocked the key to real-life computerized smell-o-vision. It's being touted for its potential use in advertising, obviously, since marketers will not stop until they have overwhelmed every last one of our senses. New Scientist explains:

The "smelling screen", invented by Haruka Matsukura at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology in Japan and colleagues, makes smells appear to come from the exact spot on any LCD screen that is displaying the image of a cup of coffee, for example.

It works by continuously feeding odours from vaporising gel pellets into four air streams, one in each corner of the screen. These air streams are blown out parallel to the screen's surface by fans, and varying the strength and direction of them manoeuvres the scent to any given spot on the screen.

It only does one smell at a time for now, but the next step is replaceable cartridges that can swap out smells. This may seem like nostril-blazing tech, though it's anything but. The concept of the first Smell-o-vision from the 60s wasn't a hell of a lot less elegant than this, even if it never really worked. And the Smell-o-vision actually had competition, from the Aromarama, as they ardently vied in an apparently epic fail-fest to fill movie theaters and home television sets with the smells of potpourri and popcorn and perfumes.

Elsewhere, the Washington Post reports on Cyrano Sciences, a company endeavoring to create an artificial nose. According to the Post, "it will come pre-programmed with a database of all sorts of smells—a database like the one at the heart of Google’s joke."

Um, why? “Factories could put electronic noses throughout their plant to detect dangerous gases that might be leaking during the manufacturing process,” Nancy Updike reported last year, in a This America Life segment on the company. “Doctors could use a handheld electronic nose to diagnose pneumonia and other conditions that have distinctive smells.”

Okay, so that's more useful than what we can safely refer to as the other end of smell tech. There's a distinct use for detecting smells—just not manufacturing artificial ones. But that hasn't stopped our best and brightest minds from trying anyway. And just ten years ago, a company called DigiScent was trying to get us to "smell the internet" by translating the web pages we browsed into odors.

For the obvious reasons, it was a complete and utter failure—no one would dare visit the Huffington Post ever again, and Christ, just Reddit—and it is now routinely roasted on "worst tech inventions" features everywhere. But hey, those were the boom days—do I have to remind anyone of Pets.com again? There's also a domain registered for Scentcom, which promises a whole world of smell-based innovations, but it's either hoax itself or thoroughly deluded.

The LCD "smelling screen" is the first stab at reviving a project in what is perhaps the most widely-ridiculed corner of the techsphere. If advertisers can figure out a way waft the smell of Big Macs into the subway to whet our appetites, they're going to do it. Short of that, "smelltech" is that perfect storm of technology: both pointless and useless. Can you imagine ever wanting to smell your computer for any reason of your own volition? Thought not.

No wonder even Google, which is no stranger to real-life tech ridiculousness, mined smelltech for comedy.